Well Hello There! As Far as online, I don't like to use my real name, so I go with Spike. Sorry for the Walls of text, but if this an introduction to something good, I might as well introduce myself well!
I'm Fairly young at 22, and have grown up among an artistic family, but I've only really been introduced to the joy of photography recently. I've been animating for a long time, drawing cartoons even longer, and earlier on in 2021 I got a job with a good friend working in animation. Although the Job doesn't inherently entail photography, I'm pretty sure it's what started me down this rabbit hole:
With the project we're working on we use a lot of 3D scanned and Photo-scanned 3D objects. You can find these online, a lot of them even for free, but you won't always find what you need. Thus You might want to do some yourself, so I learned how, but the results from a phone's photos were not the best. Big surprise, so for the first time in a long time, I started shopping for a camera. It's funny looking back at that time, probably only 9 months ago, and realizing how much I've learned about cameras. I started by just seeing what was for sale in stores, looking at reviews and buyers guides online, and I asked my boss what he would suggest to start with. He recommended the The Canon EOS M6ii, but that's quite a bit more than I can afford so I turned back to looking online.
For a while I was primarily concerned with Video Quality thinking I might want to dabble in VFX. I was going back and forth over Sony's a6000 and Canon's M series, window shopping for a few months, but unable to save up enough money to pull the trigger on one. After a while I lost interest, but I learned a lot about cameras in the process, and I'm glad I did.
I joined my Mom on a trip to an estate sale in late September to help her with bringing home a desk, and I was hoping to find a couple records I might like. In one room I ended up finding the LP of "2001 a Space Odyssey" and in another room I found this:
I did not know what a Ricoh was, but I liked it: The hard edges, the utilitarian design, and the fact that it had obviously been well cared for. Plus the camera was only $15, and I knew the glass was worth at least that much. My mom has a lot more experience with film cameras than I do and she thought it was a good deal too, so she let me borrow $30 to buy it and an 80-200mm macro lens that was with it.
I started to do some research on the camera and the lenses I got with it, and it turns out they're Pentax Mount! Funny enough, from the 90s to the late 00s my mom shot photos of us using a PZ-70 that she loved, and when that camera died on her she bought an MZ-10.
So it turns out we have a lot of Pentax glass and I started to look up more about them. I also I started repaired the 40 year old sealing foam on the Ricoh KR-5 and started to shoot film photos with it.
When I was researching old Pentax lenses I found some cool YouTube channels that cover used gear and show off how capable it still is, how high the quality of photos are on cameras even 15 years old. That honestly helped me realize that when I was window shopping before, I was being nit-picky about features that wouldn't even matter for my work; I don't use video at all, and even if I did I could get a camera from 2010 and have more than enough megapixel power to suite my needs, and it would be a ton of fun.
So now I began to look at used cameras, old reviews, and new reviews on older cameras. And since I've already got Pentax glass I might as well take advantage of the mount, Which leads me here!
I'm waiting around for The Holidays to pass and boost the used market in order to score a good deal on a used K-70, but in the meantime I've been having fun shooting photos on a point and shoot I bought and forgot in 2016. I'll have to post some of those photos soon.
If you made it this far, thank you for reading! And I look forward to using the forum!